The XB-70 strategic bomber was too costly to survive but too magnificent to be forgotten.

by John Sotham
Most visitors to the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, know that one of its highlights is the sole surviving North American XB-70 Valkyrie, but a remarkable number complain that they can't find the airplane. According to museum volunteer Charlie Frey, they enter the hangar where the big bomber is housed, walk beneath it, and never realize that directly over their heads is the belly of the only Mach 3 bomber prototype the U.S. Air Force ever built. Frey, a grandfatherly type, listens to their pleas, then simply points behind them and up--way up. Because of its size, the bomber is almost impossible to take in at close range. Instead, your eye wanders from one blistered and speed-scarred section to another: the long, slender fuselage and cockpit visor that make you feel like you're face to face with a giant snake, the gently curled leading edges of the huge delta wing, the square canards that accentuate the thin waist of the fuselage. No airplane ever built combines the sinuous carvings of supersonic aerodynamics with the awe-inspiring presence of a mighty weapon the way this one does. And although it is just one of about 200 aircraft in the collection here, the Valkyrie casts the longest shadow, its unmistakable and otherworldly shape appearing on murals, etched into glass partitions, even emblazoned on the tray under your burger and fries in the museum snack bar. Pretty regal treatment for an aircraft that never saw operational service and of which only two examples were built. It's fitting that the creation of a strategic bomber so magisterial was set into motion by the man whose name is still synonymous with the Strategic Air Command: General Curtis LeMay became chief of staff of SAC in 1948 and immediately began refashioning it to cope with a growing Soviet threat. In 1954, the year following the Soviets' first detonation of a hydrogen bomb, SAC argued that the Air Force should develop a replacement for the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, which was just entering squadron service. What SAC wanted was an airplane combining the huge payload and long range of the Boeing with the supersonic speed of the Convair B-58 Hustler, a troubled medium bomber program initiated in 1946. It was understood that such an airplane could not be built using current technologies, but technology was advancing so rapidly that it was assumed one simply wrote a requirement and technology would catch up. It was also understood that president Dwight D. Eisenhower would not commit limitless resources to a military buildup. For the Air Force, the budget honeymoon was over, and the service coped, at least in part, by hedging its bets.

Page 1 of 10

Development of an engine, for example, might be funded by two or more airplane programs that would employ it--a sleight of hand that would end up hurting, not helping, the XB-70. In 1954, the Air Force, based on a Boeing study, called for two parallel developments: an aircraft propelled in part by nuclear power and another "chemically" powered by a new kind of jet fuel with a boron additive that gave an added kick when injected into the afterburners. By 1955, Weapon System 110A was born on a piece of paper, and the Air Force called for 30 to enter service by 1963. The requirement evolved to a Mach .9 cruise followed by a Mach 2 penetration dash to the target, and the in-service date was extended to 1964. (The nuclear version would survive until 1959, and its cancellation would hurt the XB-70 program due to shared development on aircraft systems.) In June, when contractors were invited in, Weapon System 110 A/L included a reconnaissance variant (the L part). With other aerospace firms up to their elbows in missile development and other programs, only Boeing and North American Aviation responded, and the contracts were mailed in November. Boeing submitted a design resembling its large swept-wing transports and bombers, while NAA's entry resembled an inflated SM-64A Navaho, a cruise missile then under development. But both versions attempted to cope with the range and speed requirements by affixing floating wingtips that supported giant fuel tanks to be jettisoned just before the high-Mach dash. Had these been built, no runway would have been wide enough to handle either craft. Both also incorporated canard surfaces for balance, but NAA, again based on its experience with the unmanned Navaho, placed the canard out in front of the pilot, apparently without realizing that it would block his view on landing. SAC, having none of it, sent both contractors back to re-think the problem. Meanwhile, the budgetary carpet was rolling up behind them. In March 1956, Clarence A. Syvertson and Alfred J. Eggers, scientists with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, had published a paper describing a phenomenon called compression lift. In simplified form, compression lift envisions a bullet-like shape being propelled at supersonic speed and surrounded by a high-pressure shock cone. If one placed wings on the bullet, the wing would divide the shock cone in two. Now saw off the top half of the bullet. The resulting half bullet under a wing created a compression wave that pushed up on the wing; the net result was indistinguishable from lift. Suddenly it seemed possible to discard the subsonic-cruise-with-dash-speed combination and build a Mach 3 vehicle with good enough lift and low enough drag to get the range needed. NAA chief engineer Warren Swanson set about the task of coming up with the configuration. "One day we sat down and said, 'What is it that will give us the range they want?' " Swanson says. "We found that [the NACA] had tests on a one-half cone under a trapezoidal wing, and we saw that we could probably get

Page 2 of 10

the Mach number that way. We tried different shapes for the wings to fit the thesis." By mid-1957 the pace of events picked up, and both contractors urged a quick decision, believing they had already fulfilled the contract. In September, the Air Force delivered the final refined specification, calling for a top speed of Mach 3 to 3.2 at up to 75,000 feet with a range of 6,100 to 10,500 miles at a maximum gross weight of 490,000 pounds. On December 23, NAA learned that it had won. Funding trouble still hounded the program, though, as the Eisenhower administration pared and balanced budgets. In 1957, Air Force chief of staff general Thomas White announced a slowdown, and operational status slid even more, to 1965. In 1959, the boron fuel project was canceled; the XB-70 would have to fly on a formulation called JP-6. Then the F-108 Rapier, which would have shared engine development costs with the Valkyrie, was scrapped, putting added pressure on the XB-70 budget to bear the engine, escape system, and fuel system development burdens alone. But Swanson and his team were making progress. Because the engine air inlets were a potential source of drag, their design was vitally important to the success of the aircraft. All turbojet engines--including the massive General Electric YJ93s that would power the Valkyrie--require incoming air to be at subsonic speed or they can't ingest it. After rejecting NASA studies that argued for placing the inlets across the back of the wing, Swanson and his designers placed two long tunnels in a single housing underneath the wing, with each duct supplying three engines. "Some of our aerodynamicists thought that with a rectangular-shaped inlet we could get efficiency of nine-tenths at that Mach number," says Swanson. "The pressure loss going through the various shock waves [at Mach 3] was only 10 percent." In the inlets of the XB-70 (and the SR-71 Blackbird, which was being developed by Lockheed) the normal shock wave (at right angles to the direction of the airflow) that formed as the air slowed to subsonic velocity had to be held just inside the inlet, unlike what happened in slower supersonic aircraft like the B58, which kept the shock wave outside. The design teams of the Blackbird and the Valkyrie each solved the problem differently: The Blackbird's engines use round spikes that move fore and aft to position the shock wave according to altitude and speed, while the XB-70 used a variable-geometry system made up of movable inlet ramps and venting ducts. "The purpose was to slow the air down from supersonic to subsonic using an external ramp on which oblique shock waves [at angles to the direction of the airflow] were formed," says Paul Reukauf, a project manager at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center who, as a young engineering intern, was detailed to the XB-70 test program in 1967. "[The inlet] slowed those shock waves down and turned them a bit and compressed them to slow them close to Mach 1." A normal shock wave then formed just inside the inlet, and behind that, the air slowed to subsonic speed and entered the engines. "If the normal shock wave gets expelled, the whole shock train collapses and

Page 3 of 10

moves out in front of the inlet," Reukauf says. The result was a violent disturbance known as an "unstart." "You bring that normal shock wave in and control it... ," says Fitz Fulton, a former test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base and Dryden who evaluated the XB-70 for the Air Force and NASA. "If it jumps out of the inlet, you get... a very strong buffet. One of the SR-71 pilots described it as a 'train wreck.' " On the original XB-70, the pilots controlled the position of the final shock wave with a switch that moved the ramps inside the intake duct. Moving the shock forward produced the best pressure recovery and therefore the best range, but it was the least stable position for the shock in turbulence, which could disturb the flow and create an unstart. The shock was stable in an aft location, which protected it from turbulence but was less efficient. Each YJ93 turbojet was capable of producing 30,000 pounds of thrust. The compressor section, like those of all axial-flow jet engines, was made up of alternating rows of rotating compressor blades and fixed stator blades. However, the YJ93 featured advanced variable stators (already used in basic form on the GE J-79) whose angle of attack could be varied to allow the engine to manage air at a wide variety of altitudes, pressures, and speeds. In much the same way, variable geometry--or swing-wing--aircraft like the F-14, B-1 and F-111 move their wings to tailor the airframe to streak at high speed in thinner air or slow speeds near the ground. Much of the XB-70's design was derived from the development of the Navaho cruise missile. Its engine intakes, double vertical stabilizers (for high-speed directional stability), and forward canards (for greater pitch stability) were based on current aerodynamics but sometimes edged on the theoretical. And the sheer size and complexity of the Valkyrie made it an entirely new proposition. Swanson and his team had none of today's sophisticated computers, and wind tunnels hadn't yet been built to test designs under all flight conditions. NAA had a transonic wind tunnel that could accept only extremely small models, so the data gathered was of limited usefulness. The models' Reynolds number (a theoretical number in aerodynamics to account for the effects of scale) was too low, creating drag data that was artificially high. But the airplane incorporated one truly unique innovation: Its hinged outer wing sections folded downward as speed increased, first to 25 degrees, then to 60 degrees. This feature provided at least three beneficial effects: By effectively reducing the aft wing area, it compensated geometrically for the way the center of lift shifted aft above Mach 1; less wing area, less lift. The folded tips also acted as ventral fins, aiding lateral directional stability and reducing the need for larger, heavy vertical fins. Finally, the wing tip vortices were forced beneath the airplane and trapped. The XB-70 was said to "surf" on its own shock wave, which led such aircraft to be called "wave riders."

Page 4 of 10

"What the XB-70 did was to optimize that concept," says John Anderson, a National Air and Space Museum curator and an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in high-speed aerodynamics. "On other aircraft, the pressure has a tendency to leak around [the wings], but if you drop the wing tips and design the bottom surface to contain the pressure, you get high lift." Interestingly, Swanson downplays compression lift, convinced that careful engineering, rather than wave riding, produced a successful design. "Compression lift, personally, was a sales tool... . We convinced ourselves that it was happening," Swanson says. "The whole shaping of the airplane was probably the most important part... the lift-over-drag [ratio] was phenomenal." Rather than being wowed by their creation, Swanson and his team were still trying to improve the design even as the first aircraft rolled out. "I don't think anybody felt that it was so advanced that it [couldn't be improved]," Swanson says. NAA designers took greater pride in the constant stream of patents that would contribute to future aircraft than in the XB-70 itself. Some of those innovations focused on keeping the huge bomber cool. Mach 3 flight generates heat--a lot of it--as the friction of air scorches the fuselage and wing skin, raising temperatures to as high as 630 degrees Fahrenheit at the inlet lip. Conventional aluminum alloys clearly weren't up to the task and would soften. Titanium would be ideal, but it wasn't a practical choice for producing an entire fleet of strategic bombers. "There wasn't enough titanium in the United States at the time to build it," Swanson says. NAA used stainless steel honeycomb. Convair had used this new and expensive material in areas of the B-58 Hustler airframe that got exceptionally hot, and it proved to be the only workable solution for building nearly three quarters of the Valkyrie's airframe, including the wings, engine box, middle fuselage and vertical stabilizers. But it also proved to be difficult and costly to fabricate. "The airplane isn't square and isn't flat--you had curves to consider," says Ralph Ruud, who as an NAA vice president of manufacturing oversaw the construction of both Valkyries. "It was an entirely new manufacturing process from what we'd been used to. The honeycomb was brazed to the skin itself. You had a process of doing that under elevated temperature and you needed to braze the sandwich. The skin was two [thin layers of steel] with honeycomb in between." After the skin layers were attached to the steel honeycomb, the integrity of the bond was tested with X-rays and ultrasound. Because titanium was expensive, it was used only where it was required, primarily in the forward fuselage, and, as did the stainless steel skin, titanium demanded the development of new manufacturing procedures. "We had used titanium before, but in limited areas--most extensively in the aft [portion] of the F100, and prior to that we had experimented with it in the F-86D," Ruud says. "I stamped out a piece the size of a silver dollar and [told the workers], 'That's what

Page 5 of 10

it cost.' " NAA engineers eventually turned to chemical milling, in which areas of material to be removed are left unprotected as the part is placed in a bath that etches the bare metal. The process was common in the manufacture of aluminum aircraft, and enabled parts to be produced with less waste of material. "You could do it with a curve or flat piece, or taper it: You could reduce thickness by progressively moving it out of the tank," Ruud says. Chemical milling procedures pioneered on the XB-70's construction were later used on the B-1B Lancer. Besides the honeycomb skin, which acted to insulate the airplane's interior, the fuel acted as a heat sink. Also, water and ammonia in large tanks behind the cockpit provided fluids for a heat exchange system. The air-conditioned flight deck allowed a "shirt-sleeve" environment where its proposed four crew members could wear conventional flightsuits--a definite plus on long missions. For ejection or just a pressurization failure, clamshell-like capsules closed around each crew member and quickly pressurized. However, visions of a great white fleet of Valkyries to blanket the Soviet Union ended even before the XB-70's first flight, made on September 21, 1964. During the presidential campaign of 1960, candidate John Kennedy hammered the Eisenhower administration on its defense preparedness, but once he became president he too scrutinized the XB-70 program. In March 1961 Kennedy announced that the airplane would only perform research to explore high-speed flight. The production program was canceled a year after the downing of Francis Gary Powers and his high flying U-2. The ballistic missile, not the manned bomber, would become the keystone of U.S. deterrence. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara eventually allowed the construction of three, then just two, XB-70 airframes, to be used for research. The pair became perfect candidates for a NASA program that began in the mid-1960s to support development of a Mach 3 supersonic transport, or SST. Testing was severely set back in 1967 when the second XB-70 struck an F-104 during a formation photo-op flight (see "Midair!," Dec. 1990/Jan. 1991). The second airframe had incorporated improvements suggested during flight tests of the first aircraft, and was much more heavily loaded with data-gathering equipment. After an investigation into the cause of the crash, the first Valkyrie continued to fly for the next year and a half. Research centered on the potentially troublesome effects of sonic boom. Fitz Fulton and Joe Cotton began flying the Valkyrie over an instrument-equipped test range that spanned several states. The loud report of an aircraft breaking the sound barrier can be more than just an annoyance--some large supersonic aircraft damage buildings when their pressure waves hit the ground. XB-70 research revealed that the force of the boom varied not only with an aircraft's speed, but also its gross weight. Also, during some test runs, after the XB-70 had

Page 6 of 10

turned, its shock waves sometimes combined and doubled the effects on the ground. It became clear that a supersonic transport would have to be carefully tailored to reduce sonic boom. Many of the XB-70's noisome test flights extended over Idaho, and it is said that Cotton carried two five-pound bags of potatoes on one of his flights to be given to representatives of towns on the flight path with a high percentage of broken windows. As more instruments and equipment were installed, the SST study shifted to stability, inlet performance, and potential structural problems like fuselage flexing and loads on the canards. "We were primarily looking at the problems of operating an airplane at high altitude and high speed," says Fulton. "[The XB-70] was and is the biggest airplane to operate at Mach 3." To gather information on structural dynamics, the Valkyrie was equipped with the ILAF--identically located acceleration and force--package, which consisted of exciter vanes on the fuselage that induced structural vibrations of known amplitude and frequency. The aircraft's stability augmentation system, which reacted to signals from accelerometers, then automatically manipulated the control surfaces to help maintain smooth flight. Some XB-70 crews had complained about uncomfortable buffeting and trim changes caused by clear-air turbulence and changes in outside air temperature. Such upsets merely annoyed test pilots, but could prove intolerable to high-rolling vacationers jetting from New York to Paris in an SST. "The XB-70 was a high-workload airplane... up above Mach 2, about half of the copilot's time was spent monitoring the inlets," Fulton says. "I don't think the airplane was particularly difficult to fly, but it took a lot of attention." Having to rely on the first Valkyrie, which didn't feature the automatically controlled inlets found on the second aircraft, made it clear that the comfort of SST pilots--not just passengers and Idahoans--would be an important design factor if such an aircraft were to enter regular service. Later flights helped determine if the XB-70 was capable of sustained flight at Mach 3. "That was a requirement, so that the heat would seep down into the innards--the bone marrow--of the airplane," says Cotton. On October 14, 1965, Cotton and Al White reached Mach 3, but in the process, the Valkyrie lost nearly 10 feet of skin off the leading edge of its wings. "[The aircraft] rolled around a bit and there was noise and a definite disturbance," says Cotton. "We had scars all over the airplane. If you look at the one in the Air Force Museum, you might say it's band-aided. There are patches all over that machine, but I'm proud of every scar there." The XB-70 was capable of maintaining its advertised top speed, but not without getting roughed up--another potential problem for future TWA and Pan Am mechanics. Besides requiring constant repairs to its skin, the aircraft leaked fuel and was plagued by landing gear and brake malfunctions, as well as leaky hydraulics. "We had problems with the mundane stuff," Cotton says. The exotic systems--the wing folds, inlets, analog and digital data systems in the bomb bay--

Page 7 of 10

worked fine. Cotton and White solved one in-flight nose gear malfunction with a decidedly low-tech solution--a paper clip--which Cotton used to jump two circuits and lower the gear, after careful consultation with engineers on the ground. While giving a tour of the XB-70 to Charles Lindbergh, Cotton explained that in addition to gear problems, malfunctions that locked the wing folds in positions that prevented a safe landing would require Valkyrie crew members to eject. Lindbergh, hoping to fly on a future SST, asked, "All 200 of us?" After NASA's SST research program turned to the SR-71 and the third, partially built XB-70 airframe was scrapped, the surviving Valkyrie took its final flight, to the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, on February 4, 1969. On that day, aviation photographer Dan Patterson was a 15year-old high school sophomore skipping school--with his father's blessing. "It was absolutely the most amazing thing I've ever seen in the air... . I've seen the Concorde land and fly, and that's pretty sharp, but the XB-70 was like it was from another world," he says. As its engines spooled down and fell silent, the XB-70 began its final mission as a museum exhibit, a fate all the more galling to those who believe the Valkyrie's tremendous power was barely realized, especially since follow-on airframes promised even more capability. "Think about the third Valkyrie--she was going to be the ultimate weapon," says Jeannette Remak, a researcher who recently coauthored a book on the Valkyrie with former Air Force Museum curator Joe Ventolo. "They had a plan to [make it] a satellite killer. We could have been way ahead 30 years ago." But to most air power historians, the XB-70 was a dead end, despite being a fantastic aeronautical achievement. "We haven't tried to surpass the XB-70 because we haven't needed to," says Raymond Puffer, a historian at the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards. "The emphasis is on low-level and stealth. High speed is not a paradigm these days, even among fighters. Some reach Mach 2, but combat is subsonic." Puffer says that the more compact B-1, which features variable-geometry swing wings, was able to absorb the design changes necessary to take it from the stratosphere to streaking a few hundred feet above hilltops and canyons. And even after countless modifications that have strengthened its aged airframe and replaced vacuum tubes with modern electronics, the Stratofortress still flies--but only when air defenses are timid, or when it can launch standoff weapons far from any potential threats. Like the B-52, the Valkyrie was formed of massive surfaces and sharp angles that would have created a serious handicap. "One of the basic reasons it was canceled was that with the big inlets and tips folded down, it made a marvelous radar target," Swanson says. "It would have been very detectable at high altitudes. We began to think about that from the day we started the project."

Page 8 of 10

Swanson consulted with a British radar cross section expert, who predicted the Valkyrie would indeed be quite vulnerable to detection. Also of concern was the heat signature generated by the six engines, but it was thought that no aircraft could reasonably be expected to track the Valkyrie from behind because of its tremendous speed. "It all came to a big head when Robert McNamara came out to the plant and saw the airplane," Swanson says. "He thought that it would be a better strategic method to have a small aircraft overfly the enemy and [help direct] a ballistic missile to land on the spot. I suspected at the time he was talking about the YF-12 [predecessor of the SR-71 Blackbird]." Ballistic missiles may have offered some advantages over manned aircraft for attacking the Soviet Union, but assuming that bombers would be kept in the arsenal, Swanson believes that estimates of the Valkyrie's survivability were skewed by the loss of Francis Gary Powers' aircraft. The 1960 shootdown proved that U-2s were vulnerable, Swanson says, but "didn't prove that an airplane flying at Mach 3 at 75,000 to 80,000 feet could be brought down... ." The SR-71's apparent invulnerability supports his argument. However, even if the Valkyrie's demise as a warplane was inevitable, its true contribution--aborted SST plans in the past notwithstanding--has yet to be realized in future aircraft that will cross oceans in minutes, not hours. Engineers recently reviewed XB-70 test data while working on the design of NASA's highspeed civil transport, another proposed Mach 3 airliner. The HSCT was canceled, but an even more advanced vehicle is in development, one that still draws on the Valkyrie. Engineer Paul Reukauf who works on development of Hyper-X, an experimental unmanned aircraft that will operate at Mach 8 to 10, says, "There is exactly a direct correlation between XB-70 and SR-71 work and future projects like the Hyper-X." The XB-70 and the SR-71 were propelled not only by their turbojet core engines but also by the powerful compression of air as it moved through their inlets before entering the engines. "In fact, the scramjets and ramjets we're looking at are basically the same engine as the intakes of the SR-71 and the XB-70 if you injected fuel behind them," Reukauf says. "The propulsion technology [for a hypersonic transport] is pretty well in hand because of those aircraft." But more than 30 years after it last flew, the Valkyrie continues to arouse emotion. Its legacy is still growing, and Dayton museum volunteer Charlie Frey keeps a notebook that gets fatter with time. The museum's expert on all things Valkyrie, Frey knows most of its secrets: He shines his small flashlight into the nose gear well of the aircraft to illuminate a bird's nest he found tucked behind hydraulic tubing, built while the aircraft was stored outside for nearly 20 years. As he stands next to the XB-70's left main gear, its silver-tinted, heat-reflecting tires as high as his chest, Frey explains the complicated contortions the strut endured as it retracted. The Valkyrie's wheel wells are aft and inboard of the strut, out of line with the wheels, which often puzzles even spatially savvy

Page 9 of 10

visitors. Frey reaches into a pocket of his red volunteer's vest, festooned with aircraft pins and patches, and produces a four-inch model of the strut that he made from balsa wood and model aircraft wheels. He animates the hinged model with his fingers to illustrate the retraction sequence. When visitors ask about the midair collision that claimed the second XB-70, Frey pauses, steps back, and delivers a well-researched account of the events that day, using his hands to illustrate the flight paths of both the doomed aircraft. He's a regular one-man Valkyrie show. At closing time, when the visitors file out, they've seen what they came to see, and Frey has kept the legend alive. Supplemental Information: Weapon System 110A Reprint of an article by by John Sotham, originally published in Air& Space/Smithsonian, August/September 1999. All rights reserved.

Page 10 of 10